Matthew Fuller: How to Sleep: The Art, Biology and Culture of Unconsciousness (2018)
Filed under book | Tags: · aesthetics, biology, brain, dreams, homeostasis, insomnia, sleep, unconscious
“Sleep is quite a popular activity, indeed most humans spend around a third of their lives asleep. However, cultural, political, or aesthetic thought tends to remain concerned with the interpretation and actions of those who are awake. How to Sleep argues instead that sleep is a complex vital phenomena with a dynamic aesthetic and biological consistency.
Arguing through examples drawn from contemporary, modern and renaissance art; from literature; film and computational media, and bringing these into relation with the history and findings of sleep science, this book argues for a new interplay between biology and culture. Meditations on sex, exhaustion, drugs, hormones and scientific instruments all play their part in this wide-ranging exposition of sleep as an ecology of interacting processes.
How to Sleep builds on the interlocking of theory, experience and experiment so that the text itself is a lively articulation of bodies, organs and the aesthetic systems that interact with them. This book won’t enhance your sleeping skills, but will give you something surprising to think about whilst being ostensibly awake.”
Publisher Bloomsbury Academic, London, 2018
Lines series
ISBN 1474288707, 9781474288705
192 pages
Rudolf Arnheim: Entropy and Art: Essay on Disorder and Order (1971)
Filed under book | Tags: · art, entropy, homeostasis, information theory, perception, physics, psychophysics
“This essay is an attempt to reconcile the disturbing contradiction between the striving for order in nature and in man and the principle of entropy implicit in the second law of thermodynamics; between the tendency toward greater organization and the general trend of the material universe toward death and disorder.”
Publisher University of California Press, 1971
ISBN 0520018036, 9780520018037
64 pages
Publisher (2010 edition)
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